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to mean death. We see prayers and sacrifices to a non-god, and gorgeous temples scooped patiently out of rocky mountains in his honour. Statues of this non-god are scattered broadcast over half the globe, and the tolerant patience and activity of his missionaries is unique in the history of religions. This is the bewildering Buddhism of popular treatises ; and the activity of one special writer has contributed. largely to foster these ideas.

Dr. Rhys Davids is a very hard-working Pâli scholar. I consider that students of Buddhism are much indebted to him for his translations. But he is a confused and untrained thinker. In treatises, in lectures, in encyclopædias, in magazines, and in the weekly press, he is constantly putting forth an aspect of Buddhism which it will be the special object of this work to assail. Stated concisely, his position is this

1. Buddha preached flat atheism.1

2. He taught, "in a complete and categorical manner," that man has no "soul nor anything of any sort that exists in any manner after death.” 2

3. He despised mysticism, and disbelieved in anything outside of the world of matter.3

1 "Buddhism," p. 207.

2 Ibid., p. 99. See also "Hibbert Lectures," p. 109.

3"Buddhism takes as its ultimate fact, the existence of the material world." ("Buddhism, p. 87.)

4. This Buddhism is to be found in its original purity solely in the sacred books of Ceylon, a literature which, if translated into English, would be four times as long as our Bible.1 These sacred books, according to the Cingalese chronicles, were made canonical three months after Buddha's death, and "re-affirmed" at a convocation summoned by King Aśoka, B.C. 250.

5. In the north of India, about the commencement of the Christian era, an innovating Buddhism arose which proclaimed a belief in God. It was called the Buddhism of the "Great Vehicle," in contradistinction to the original Buddhism of the "Little Vehicle," which denied God and a future life entirely.2 Ceylon has never known anything of this innovating faith. As opposed to this, I shall show :

1. That according to the express declaration of Hwen Thsang, the celebrated Chinese pilgrim who visited India at a time when the controversy between the disciples of the Great and Little Vehicles was furiously raging, the Buddhism of Ceylon was the Buddhism of the Great Vehicle.

2. According to the same authority, the disciples of the Little Vehicle called sarcastically the innovating Great Vehicle "Śunya pushpa” (“The Carriage that

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drives to the Great Nowhere"). They said that this agnostic Buddhism did not come from Buddha. And Hwen Thsang confesses that it was due chiefly to Vasubandhu and Asangha, who, about the date of the Christian era, received it in visions from Maitreya, the Coming Buddha. Dr. Rhys Davids has plainly shuffled the two Buddhisms together.

3. I shall show also that King Aśoka, far from "re-affirming" the colossal library of Cingalese books, knew nothing at all about them. On the Bairât Rock he has given a totally different list of seven short tractates that his monks were then to begin to learn by heart. These and his profession of faith were to be recited at his stûpa temples, and nothing else.

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"Confess and believe in God!" was the motto of Aśoka1 'Confess and disbelieve in God!" seems the motto of Cingalese Buddhism.

4. The Buddhists call their religion Prajñâ Pâramitâ, which means literally the "Wisdom of the Other Bank."

At an early date the Âryas of India believed in a world of ghosts. This world had for chief one Yama, the Indian Adam. Once he was the first-born of the living, then he became the first-born of the dead. His kingdom, Yamâlaya, was girt by a mighty river,

1 Dhauli inscription.

the Vaitaranî. This stream the ghosts of good men traversed, not in Charon's boat, but by holding on to the tail of the sacred cow, as the Hindoos, aided by cattle, traverse rivers to this day. The domains of Yama were erected by the celestial architect, Viswa Karma; and at first they were lovely rather than hateful. In the Mahâbhârata it is announced that fear of enemies is not known by the good, nor hunger, nor scarcity, nor sorrow, nor bodily pain. Mountains of excellent food are piled up for the virtuous. These negative advantages would strike the poor Ârya struggling on earth with hunger, sickness, and the dread of being offered up to Rudra by a successful enemy. Palaces and jewelled wives were promised also. The terrible red-hot iron female who embraced the lustful man, and the grotesque swollen belly that was to be the future of the glutton, were after ideas. The earlier Yama lived in a palace. The later Yama had a terrible mace, red eyes and garments, and extra-sized teeth. He kept a recording angel, "He who paints in secret.' "Pits filled with devouring worms and insects and fire" were prepared for the evil-doing Hindû.

This places us in a better position to settle whether Buddhism, or the "Wisdom of the Other Bank," was occupied with this world alone or with the other. In point of fact, Buddhism, like the philosophy of the

Vedas and the Vedantic school, has always been a pure idealism. Let us turn to the treatise named Prajñâ Pâramitâ (the "Wisdom of the Other Bank ") to see what Buddha said on the subject. In speaking to his senior disciple, Śâriputra, he said that ignorant men "represent to themselves all things of which in truth not one has any existence;" and a little further on, he explained that the appearances of the phenomenal world were "as if a clever magician, or the pupil of a clever magician, caused a vast concourse of men to appear at a cross-road where four great thoroughfares meet, and having caused them to appear, caused them again to vanish.”1

I think it is very patent from the "Hibbert Lectures," that the perversions of Dr. Rhys Davids are due to his sympathies with Comtism; but I contend. that the study of an ancient religion is not philosophy, but pure history.

I think that signs of a juster appreciation of the great reformer are already patent. Mr. Edwin Arnold has a "firm conviction that a third of mankind would never have been brought to believe in blank abstractions or in Nothingness as the issue and Crown of Being." 2

The Rev. Professor Beal, too, has uttered a protest

1 Oldenberg, "Buddha," p. 239.
2. 66 Light of Asia," preface, p. xv.

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